We Hunt the Flame

by Hafsah Faizal

  It was only after she had said the words that she believed them.

  Zafira left her room with a sense of finality, Yasmine trailing in silence. But the strength of her words faltered when she glimpsed into Umm’s room, Umm’s sleeping form denying them a goodbye. Zafira hadn’t thought she would miss her mother, but their conversation the day before had left her bereft.

  Lana’s small shadow crept to her. She was bulked by her coat, dress hem trailing. She gripped her green shawl with fidgeting fingers, knuckles whiter than the cold allowed.

  Zafira swung her satchel over her shoulder. “Ready to live somewhere else?” She still wasn’t sure how she would put the question to the caliph when she met him. Skies, the caliph.

  “While you’re off dying somewhere?” Lana shrugged and bit her lip.

  “There you go! The right questions are finally being asked,” Yasmine cheered.

  “Why? Why are you doing this?” Lana asked.

  “I’m the only chance we have,” Zafira said, trailing her knuckles over Baba’s blue coat. The only vengeance Baba will receive.

  “By dying in some cursed place? They’ll hail you as a martyr and celebrate you. Talk about you. That’s what happens in the books. But you’ll be dead and I’ll be … Okht, I’ll be alone,” Lana whispered.

  Zafira’s eyes burned. “It’s what Baba would have wanted.”

  “Don’t go in there on Baba’s name,” Lana pleaded, an edge to her voice. “He’s dead.”

  “She’s right,” Yasmine said, voice soft. “If you’re going to risk your life, it has to be on your will. The living can’t survive with promises to the dead.”

  It wasn’t just because of Baba. Why didn’t they understand? It was magic. It was their survival.

  “Don’t you want magic?” Zafira asked, fervent. She looked at Lana. “Think of Baba’s stories—we can experience them, feel them. Live them. We’ll finally know what we were born with.”

  “A life without magic isn’t so bad.”

  “A life without magic is what stole the desert from us. And Baba. And Umm. Your parents, too, Yasmine. It’s what’s causing the Arz to grow.”

  “Baba is gone, Okht. And Yasmine’s parents are dead. The Arz can grow. We can move elsewhere.” Lana’s eyes glistened with tears. She didn’t understand that they couldn’t go anywhere the Arz wouldn’t follow; no one in Arawiya could. “A life with magic means nothing to me if you aren’t in it.”

  Lana’s words carved a chasm in Zafira’s heart. She swept her sister’s hair from her forehead, tucking it behind the shell of one ear. She brushed her fingers along her freckled skin, still soft as a babe’s.

  She didn’t say all would be right. She did not say she would return. Or that Lana would be safe. She would waste no breath with false promises.

  “Let’s go meet the caliph.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “I’m sure we’re tired. Are you tired, Nasir?” Altair asked, breaking the silence of the howling wind.

  Mildly, Nasir registered Altair calling him by his name, not his title. He lowered his sand-dusted keffiyah from his face.

  The Arz was … gone.

  In its place lay a stream of splotched black stones that stretched from east to west. But that wasn’t what drew Nasir’s gaze. Laa, the water did. A line of azure met the sky, crystalline beneath the beams of the sun. It was harsh, even at this early hour, and the farther Nasir looked, the more the world wavered. There wasn’t a man or house in sight to witness it, only endless sands of burnt umber.

  The water lapping the stony shore was a foreign sound his mother had murmured stories about, before she was killed—died. Before she had died. Surprise was making him slip, making true memories creep past forged ones. Nasir clenched his jaw and tugged on the horse’s reins just so the creature would move.

  The water’s apparent gentleness masked a stark savagery. After the Arz had appeared and the royal minarets went dark, the sea was said to have become a monster in its own right. Like you. Though, unlike Nasir, he did not know which master this monster answered to.

  Nor who had made it the monster that it was.

  “Look at those sleek curves. One fine woman,” Altair whistled, hand at his brow. Nasir squinted against the sun. A grand ship bobbed against the current a little ways to his right. Fine indeed. “Perhaps it’s all a mirage.”

  Nasir stilled when movement caught his eye. A flash of silver and a glint of white, and everything suddenly made a sort of sick sense.

  “That is no mirage,” Nasir said coolly.

  Altair’s demeanor hardened when he followed Nasir’s gaze to the Silver Witch.

  She moved in flashes. She was afar, then closer, and then directly before him. Three blinks, and Nasir stared down at her flawless face, his horse rearing, flanks damp with sweat.

  He lost control of his limbs and found himself standing on the sand so that the woman wouldn’t have to crane her neck. The horses backed away. All of this happened on her call, he knew, but without so much as a twitch from her. Was there no limit to her power?

  “Did your father expect you to crawl through the Arz and swim to Sharr?” the witch asked, dark eyes moving from Nasir to assess Altair.

  “He is not my father,” Altair said, venom in his voice.

  “Yet you stand beside your prince as an equal.”

  “And if that irked him, I’m sure he would make it known,” Altair replied curtly. “He does have a way of making a state—”

  “Altair,” Nasir warned.

  The witch’s gaze glittered. “Indeed, General, listen to your commander.”

  The black stones gleamed as the sun rose higher.

  “What do you want?” Nasir said, keeping his voice level. They needed to leave.

  “What do I want? I’m here because Ghameq counted on my interception. Had you set foot in the Arz, you would both be dead. I am not your enemy, princeling.”

  Nasir bit his tongue—Ghameq had promised a ship would be waiting for him. He hadn’t even mentioned the Arz.

  The witch gave him a knowing look, and with a twist of her crimson lips, she drew an object from the folds of her silver cloak. A disc of deep red, its edges etched in silver filigree. “A compass. To help you find what you desire most.”

  “The Jawarat,” Nasir said, and waited one extra beat before taking it from her. It buzzed in his hand with the barest thrum of something.

  The witch only smiled. “I’m sure Ghameq sent you here with enough threats to last you the journey. That poor girl has already lost her tongue.”

  Nasir bristled, remembering Kulsum in Altair’s chambers. When Altair was in bed. “She’s of no concern to me. She belongs to the general now.”

  “Ah. So she’s the reason behind the ink on your arm.”

  Nasir tugged at his already lowered sleeve and gritted his teeth. Witch. Water lapped against the stones. Somewhere a vulture screamed, circling a fresh corpse.

  “I’ve also heard of a young boy in the dungeons. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of souls you’ll grow attached to,” she tsked. “Some advice for your journey: Quell your compassion. Stave it. Exploit it. Remember who trained you, hashashin. Do not sour her image.”

  Nasir paused and lifted his eyes to hers. There was no mirth in her gaze now, only cool assessment.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Someone like you.” She turned, and the curve of her retreating shoulders beckoned, almost a challenge. “You’re welcome for the ship.”

  He blinked, and the Silver Witch vanished.

  CHAPTER 16

  Zafira often dreamed of the Arz bleeding the way Baba had. The dark trees always blossomed red in her dreams.

  Now they were gone.

  Beneath the shadows of her hood, she blinked a thousand times, but the Arz had vanished. The crisp cold stung her nostrils and she paused, expecting a wave of relief. Then why do I feel loss?

  Shop owners with flour-dusted thobes and grease-splotched dresses were
scattered across the snowy plain. They couldn’t know about the trek. They’d likely noticed the Arz’s absence from the sooq and hurried here, loud voices clouding the cold air. Despite their excitement, no one crossed the unnatural line where the snow ended like the clean cut of a knife.

  Zafira hopped down from Sukkar, helping Lana do the same. When she placed a hasty kiss on Sukkar’s nose, he gave her a curious nudge, for even he knew Zafira was miserly in her affections.

  Beside her, Yasmine and Misk dismounted a mare of their own, and Deen dug through the satchel strapped to Lemun’s saddle before letting out a whistle. “Now that’s a sight.”

  Yasmine hummed in agreement, but she held herself differently. A little fragile, a little delicate.

  Because of me. Zafira dragged Lana to the front of the crowd, brushing past a trio of boisterous men and a tiny seamstress, bits of thread clinging to her like worms.

  They stopped at a border of black. Where the Arz had once reached for the skies, black pebbles covered the ground, and no sign of the forest remained. No stray tree, no pile of dead twigs, no bush or bramble. Nothing at all to hint at its existence.

  It had vanished entirely, the odd stones left in its wake.

  Deen stepped to her side, and when she squinted at him against the morning light, she knew that he, too, was reliving their encounter with the Silver Witch. It wasn’t loss that she felt, she realized. It was the familiar presence of something that was there, despite how it seemed to her eyes.

  “Do you feel it?” she murmured to Deen when Lana bent to pick up one of the stones. The whisper of trees and the brush of leaves.

  He nodded, and she quelled a surge of guilty, selfish elation because she wasn’t alone.

  Deen lifted his eyes to the skies. “Not even the Silver Witch can be powerful enough to make an entire forest disappear permanently.”

  “Maybe not, but she’s making the start of this journey easy,” Zafira said. Unease roiled in her stomach. If the Silver Witch could make an entire forest disappear, why couldn’t she retrieve a book?

  “Which isn’t reassuring,” he agreed. “But this is what you’ve chosen, no? And if she can’t lie…” He trailed off.

  “You believed that? What—if she lies, she’ll light up in flames?”

  He gave her a mock laugh. “She simply can’t lie. Some creatures can’t. Like safin.”

  Zafira loosed a slow breath as he meandered away. As if meeting creatures that weren’t human was an everyday thing.

  A breeze heavy with salt brushed Zafira’s skin. She had been so engrossed with the lack of the Arz that she hadn’t noticed what its disappearance had given her: the sea. The daama Baransea, where, true to the witch’s word, a gleaming ship bobbed in its waters. It looked no more than a quick jog away—a lie, for the Arz was far larger.

  Zafira imagined Baba beside her, finally seeing the sea he so loved, the vastness he had spun countless stories about. He had loved the idea of the sea, for he had never seen it. He never would.

  “It’s real,” Lana whispered, a tiny thing for fourteen years. She latched her fingers around Zafira’s cloak.

  “Did you doubt its existence?”

  The waves lapped forward, each one imitating the last, and the longer Zafira stared, the more it felt she was moving with them.

  “I don’t know. It was always a story,” Lana said, looking up at her. The melancholy in her eyes knifed Zafira’s chest. Finger by finger, Lana pulled away. Zafira felt she had upset her somehow.

  She watched her sister show her salvaged stone to Deen and then Yasmine, who looked stunning as always in a pale blue dress laced with white. She watched Misk reach for the pebble, drawing a shy smile from Lana. It would last only a day, that shyness, and then Deen, Yasmine, and Misk would be her family.

  Zafira, a memory.

  When she turned back to the sea, she was surprised to see it waver before her. She was surprised by the tears that she wiped away, carefully sealing her heart once more.

  The sea glistened like liquid jewels, freedom, beckoning as the Arz had. It called to her, a purr across the soft waves that sounded much like her name.

  Chimes on the wind. Her name in a breeze.

  “Hunter,” Yasmine hissed.

  Silence fell, and she felt the weight of eyes like countless stones pelted upon her back. Black pebbles lay uneven beneath her boots. Zafira blinked and tried to make sense of the ache in her chest, the racing of her pulse. That whisper.

  Yasmine looked as if roots were about to sprout out of the ground and swallow Zafira whole. It’s safe, Zafira wanted to say, but she did not doubt the Silver Witch’s smile. That flicker of darkness she felt whenever the woman was near.

  She was saved from an explanation when a horn disrupted the silence; ululating and chanting soon followed as a caravan approached with half a dozen camels draped in wool, tan coats spotted with snow.

  Zafira made sense of the chanting: Sayyidi. Sayyidi. Sayyidi.

  The Caliph of Demenhur had come.

  Yasmine yanked Zafira to the front of the crowd. A boy tried to look beneath her hood, but she tugged on the fabric, further shrouding her face. She clenched and unclenched her fists by her sides, the smooth leather of her gloves contouring around her fingers. She threw a discreet glance at Deen.

  He was already watching her, eyes dark in thought.

  Commotion surrounded the caravan as a man hopped down from one of the camels. He wore a red-and-white-checkered keffiyah atop his head. A small beard framed his chin. A slender nose, chiseled cheekbones—he was a good-looking man.

  His eyes, however, made the air catch in her throat. Had that same haunted look not been in Lana’s eyes, Zafira wouldn’t have understood the utter despair. Who hadn’t the curse touched? Even the ones better off than she were suffering.

  “Who is that man?” Zafira asked, leaning toward Deen.

  Something flickered in his gaze. “Haytham. The caliph’s advisor. He was one of Demenhur’s best falconers before his father, the late advisor, introduced him to the caliph.”

  “Oh.” Zafira couldn’t imagine a life in which she did anything for fun and sport, let alone rely on a bird to win something for her.

  An older man in a dusky blue turban descended from a traditional howdah—a small, tented seat atop the camel. His layered gray thobe darkened as it trailed the snow, making him seem even more ancient than he was. People dropped to their knees, drenching themselves in snow. Others lifted two fingers to their brows, heads low.

  The caliph. The cause of her dress, of hatred toward the Sisters, and of oppression against the hundreds of women in Demenhur.

  He was nonplussed by the missing Arz, and she wondered if the Silver Witch had discussed more with him than she had with Zafira. His hooded gaze drifted over the small crowd, pausing on her. The Hunter. She clutched Yasmine’s arm.

  “Since the loss of magic, you are our one source of light,” he called. “At last. Come here, boy.”

  He knows me, she thought, before her brain reminded her that this was the old nut responsible for the imbalance between men and women. Lana clasped her hand, but Yasmine jerked her head. Yalla, her glare shouted. Deen pursed his lips, sharing Zafira’s worry tenfold. Misk watched curiously.

  Zafira rocked forward on her toes. The ice crackled beneath her boots. The air hung still. Dozens of eyes bored into her cloak, and her heart might as well have hopped into her hands; she felt its thrum in her fingers.

  The awkward silence was broken by a group of soldiers dismounting camels. At the distinct lilt of another caliphate’s dialect, Zafira jerked her head to a dark-skinned man laughing with his fellows. A Pelusian, though he wore the Demenhune uniform. How had a man born to Pelusia, a half-month’s journey away, ended up in Demenhur?

  Zafira had a deep respect for the Pelusians. Though their fertile lands were faltering, they nourished all of Arawiya. Without them, the kingdom would lack the mechanical advancements they had, too. Like the chandeliers the rich owne
d, or the Nimrud lens for magnifying texts and lighting fires.

  Zafira stopped. The caliph, the caliph, the caliph.

  “Sayyidi,” she murmured, clearing her throat when she realized she hadn’t lowered her voice. Her skin burned and she dropped to one knee, gritting her teeth when the cold seeped through.

  The caliph laughed, a low rumbling filled with warmth. It reminded her of that precious vial of honey Deen had brought from Zaram. Try as she might, she couldn’t summon her rage.

  “Please, rise,” Ayman al-Ziya, the Caliph of Demenhur, said.

  Zafira stood carefully, hands at her sides, hood throbbing against her scalp. From the confines of it, she studied the caliph without shame. His face sagged with wrinkles, but his brown eyes shone like those of a child’s, thrilled at a game. A long beard wound from his chin, wisping at the ends.

  “And show some respect.” The words were said in that clipped accent—the Pelusian from that group of soldiers. All of Arawiya spoke the same language, with slight variations to each tongue, but Zafira didn’t need help reading between the words.

  Drop your hood was what he meant.

  Silence fell with the sharpness of a blade. Eyes fell upon her, watching, waiting, burning. Countless. Blood roared in her ears.

  When she didn’t move, the Pelusian grunted and shuffled.

  Fingers brushed her hood.

  Snow pulsed beneath her boots.

  The cold caught in her chest.

  “Enough,” the caliph thundered. Zafira flinched. “Haytham, rid me of these men. Respect is earned, Pelusian, and you certainly have none of it.”

  No one moved. No one breathed.

  Zafira exhaled, and the world spun back into motion. Her fingers twitched to throw down her hood. Be proud, Yasmine had said time and time again. But she couldn’t be. She wasn’t proud. She was afraid.

  She was afraid of being a woman. Yasmine’s disappointment settled heavily on her back.

  Sweet snow below. A soldier had just ordered her to drop her hood, and the caliph had snapped at him on her behalf. Zafira watched from the corners of her eyes as Haytham led the group of soldiers away, shouting the entire time. His final command was followed by a reply of which Zafira caught a hiss: “He looks like a daama nisa.” Indeed, she was a “bloody woman,” and it was the Pelusian’s loss for not knowing any better.