Her slow drawl was accompanied by a look of amusement. A breeze wound through the grass and she shivered, reaching for her hood before her eyes tightened in the realization that she wasn’t wearing her cloak. Her fingers brushed her ring, and her lips parted ever so slightly. He watched, transfixed, wondering how those small, mindless motions always drew his attention.
Something had shifted between them last night. Want pulsed at the pads of his fingers.
He swallowed. “This doesn’t look like nowhere to me.”
This was as peaceful as their journey would be. The waters undulated a brilliant cobalt beneath the teasing wind. Rare, clear skies cupped the sun. It was softer, fighting the growing darkness, barely lifting the small hairs on the back of his neck, but it was more than he had seen in a while. And if he were feline like Benyamin, he would be curled beneath it, relishing in its warmth. But he was no stray, nor was he one to sit idly and relish anything in life.
It wasn’t peaceful, he decided. It was a moment between moments. The calm before a storm.
“Looks can be deceiving,” she replied.
Beneath the beat of the sun, all he saw was the starkness of her skin and the sharp cut of her lips. But last night, beneath the glow of the moon, that skin had coaxed and those lips had beckoned.
They still do. Nasir twisted his mouth and resumed his sharpening. The hiss of a blade knifed the sway of the tall grass, and a hand extended toward him bearing a jambiya, the point facing away. He took the dagger and studied the simple leather hilt, worn from age and the exchange of palms. Her father’s or mother’s, he assumed, and likely the only blade that felt comfortable in her hand.
Murderer, she had said that first day. It was no small deed, handing over a trusted weapon to an enemy.
He set his sword down and started grinding her blade. “It’s Safaitic.”
“What is?” she asked, watching him.
“The ink. My arm. It’s Safaitic. I don’t expect you to know how to read it.” Kharra. He should have phrased the words as a question.
She only pressed her lips together and neither denied nor agreed. “Then there’s no harm in showing me, is there?”
“Define ‘harm,’ Huntress.” He ran his fingers along the edge of her blade, and it snagged on the leather of his glove—sharp, but it could be sharper.
She glanced to the others. Altair made Kifah laugh as she tossed her lightning blades at a tree. Benyamin had climbed up the same tree and was lazily flipping through his book.
“Physical pain,” she said.
He gave a dry laugh, her dagger wheezing under his ministrations. “Then you’ve never experienced real pain before.”
“Emotions are an inconvenience.” But her tone suggested she didn’t believe the words. She was saying them for his benefit, to study his reaction with those sharp eyes.
“Until they broach into the level of pain,” he said softly. He stood and passed her jambiya back. His fingers brushed hers and despite the barrier of his glove, he drew in a sharp breath, every part of him alert.
She slid the dagger back into its sheath. How could a hunter be so delicate? Not even a speck of dirt marred the skin beneath her nails. She started to leave but stopped, head half turned as if to say, This is your last chance.
He felt he had reached some sort of … understanding with her. A bond, fragile and bleak. Perhaps it was pity, for what she had seen the night before. A protest stirred in his chest, begging him to shatter, shatter, shatter.
Bonds held no place in his life.
He hesitated for a beat of his heart before unstrapping his gauntlet and lifting his sleeve. He averted his eyes from the twisted calligraphy as she drew close a little too quickly. It was one thing to know what had been written on his arm; it was another to see it, to be reminded of the day he had it pierced into his skin. To be reminded of his mother.
The Huntress’s breath caressed his arm as she leaned in, warm despite her iciness. Her shoulder brushed his. Her ring tapped his elbow in a steadily falling beat. Sensations clashed and he wanted—no. She reached out, and he saw the path her fingers were about to take, the words she wanted to trace.
“What happened to no touching?” he asked.
She pulled away with a sharp inhale.
He tugged his sleeve down and strapped the leather back in place. He cursed the rasp in his voice, the falter. She had seen enough. She had seen too much.
* * *
Zafira watched him leave, his shoulders stiff, the sun casting his dark hair in a gleam of light.
He couldn’t have known that she knew Safaitic. Baba had tried to teach her, and it was rusty at best, but she was able to read the words on his arm. The swirling black, shaped like a teardrop on his golden skin.
I once loved.
She had heard those words elsewhere, but they seemed forever ago now. He was a mess of scars like the sky was a mess of stars. From the one stretched down his face, to the craters on his back, to the ink on his arm. For that was what scars were, weren’t they? A remembrance of moments dark.
There was more to the prince than she’d first thought.
“Bonding moment khalas?” someone asked.
Altair. Yes, their bonding moment certainly was over. There was a weight in the general’s eyes now, likely a product of learning that the Silver Witch was one of the daama Sisters.
She took the replenished goatskin from his hands, wiping the stray droplets with the edge of her tunic. Altair and Nasir were so different, it was a marvel they hailed from the same caliphate. Nasir was the dark to Altair’s light. The night to his day.
“We were just getting to the good stuff,” she said dryly.
Altair laughed. “Sounds like Nasir. Trust him to leave when things are getting good.”
“You say it fondly.”
He made a choking sound, and a laugh bubbled to her lips. She still puzzled over their relationship. They were well acquainted, that was certain, but how Altair could be a ruthless general was beyond her.
Her smile slipped and her thoughts stumbled to a halt. A ruthless general. A coldhearted murderer. How could she have forgotten?
Altair turned to her, blue eyes bright with whatever he wanted to say. They were the same hue as the stream, a thought she stabbed quiet. But he took in her expression, the stiff set of her shoulders. The distrust she should never have neglected.
He looked away without a word, and the curve of his shoulders collapsed.
When they reached the others, Benyamin smiled, but whatever peace she had felt before had disappeared, and all she could do was stare back.
Kifah pursed her lips before deciding against whatever she was about to say. “We should head up the stream. Avoid the sun,” she remarked instead.
“The sun has been a coward ever since the ifrit attack,” Nasir said, glancing to the dull skies.
Altair was still quiet, and the conversation felt forlorn without his commentary.
“There’s no point following a trail that won’t lead us where we need to go,” Zafira said, and Benyamin hmmed in agreement. “We’re supposed to head that way.”
They followed her outstretched hand to a point in the horizon where the skies deepened to angry black and the sands swelled in waves of copper.
“If I were less realistic and more pessimistic, I would say we’re going to die,” Kifah drawled in the silence.
Nasir sheathed his scimitar and stalked forward.
“Best not keep death waiting, then.”
CHAPTER 55
Weariness and wariness became a common exchange, the sun weighing them down despite its gloomy glow. They trekked and tracked for five whole days without incident, taking short rests and eating dates to maintain energy.
No, not tracking. Zafira was no tracker; she was a hunter. She hunted. But hunters tracked, and trackers hunted, didn’t they? Where are you going with this? Zafira tilted her head and imagined her thoughts shifting into a box she closed tight. If only it were that easy.
An idle mind is the devil’s playground, she told herself, but the words felt like shadows against her lips.
As they shuffled through the sands, Zafira listened for sounds of life. Birds, the hiss of sand critters, a predator cry—only the silence ever shouted back. Sometimes their surroundings mimicked her thoughts, wilting and wavering before she blinked and everything righted.
The darkness was always happy to see her.
Zafira could feel its happiness whenever the sun dimmed further or they traversed an outcropping or another passage of ruins where the shadows lived. They bent and shifted in a dance of elation. Tendrils drifted beneath the folds of her tunic, curled around her arms, nipped at her ears, a lover she could not see. Did no one else feel what she did?
Benyamin glanced sideways at her. “Trouble, Huntress?”
The genuine concern in his voice nearly undid her. She blinked and refocused on the stone ahead. A set of columns had toppled, one against the other, creating a bridge for creatures to hop across.
“No,” she said softly.
Nearly everything dragged her mind to grief—Yasmine, and how Zafira would tell her of her brother’s death. Deen, dying for her. Lana, caring for their mother. Umm, and the five years Zafira had spent avoiding her. Nasir, and the way her body had begun to react whenever he was near. Why had Arawiya’s lethal hashashin succumbed to a needle and inscribe the word “love,” in any form or tense, on his skin?
“Why is there a flower in your turban, you bumbling fool?” Benyamin asked.
Zafira threw a glance at Altair, whose red-rimmed turban housed a blood lily.
Altair frowned. “What are you talking about? My fashion tastes are too exquisite for flowers.”
“Says the flower on your head,” Nasir pointed out.
Kifah, not one to miss out on a quip when it came to the Sarasin general, was unusually silent.
“Akhh,” Altair grumbled, and Zafira heard the shuffle of him pulling something from his turban. “You call this a flower?”
The vibrant flower on Altair’s head was now a dead leaf in his hand, curling into itself. Zafira darted a glance at Kifah, who winked. The miragi’s work.
“It’s the island, alerting you to your terrible taste,” Nasir said.
Kifah snickered at Altair’s wide-eyed bewilderment, and the general tossed the leaf to the sand and stomped on it for good measure.
They passed dunes, dunes, and more dunes. Sometimes Zafira would catch Altair leaning close to Kifah, making a tender smile bloom across the warrior’s lips. Other times, she would catch the general and Benyamin in conversation, eyes forlorn, voices low. Nasir watched them all, mouth pursed, ever weary.
To a darting glance, the prince was cool indifference. To someone who watched him, his focus was intent and inquisitive. The mark of someone born with a curious mind, but forced to use it elsewhere: In calculating death. His gaze slid to Zafira, and she quickly looked away, neck warming.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Kifah asked as the desert darkened once more. It wasn’t a cover of clouds that obscured the sun. It was the sky itself. Caging them away from the orb of light.
“No,” Zafira said, eyeing the knife twirling in Kifah’s hand. How could she explain the song the darkness sang? The frenzy in her bloodstream that only settled when she led them in the direction it wanted? “But if you have a better idea, by all means.”
Kifah grumbled something beneath her breath.
“Couldn’t you have brought a few camels on that ship of yours?” Altair groused.
“You should have sent me a letter asking for one or ten,” said Benyamin.
Kifah gave Altair a sidelong glance. “Or you could ask him to carry you. Put some of that safin strength to good use.”
Zafira wasn’t sure Benyamin could carry Altair, safin strength or not.
“Such an imaginative mind, One of Nine,” Altair said.
After what felt to be hours, Altair complained that his stomach was eating itself, so they stopped to rest and the shadows swallowed the sky, their only indication of nightfall. There wasn’t a single star in the dark expanse, despite the tales Zafira had heard of the stars leading bedouins through unremarkable sands.
“Who will be assuming the role of watchman tonight? For it will not be me,” announced Benyamin.
“Do you think I like it when you stare at my perfection?” Altair asked.
Zafira crossed her arms. “He probably can’t sleep unless a woman’s looking at him.”
“Kifah looks at me,” Altair said, grinning at the Pelusian.
Kifah scowled. “Only because I’m wondering how best to chop off your head with your own sword.”
Altair turned to Zafira. “Do you volunteer? Because I—”
Nasir cut him off with a growl. “I’ll take the first watch.”
“Such generosity, princeling,” Altair exclaimed, clapping him on the shoulder. “No one else would oblige so readily, you see. Akhh, I’m not worried about my well-being in the slightest. But I think I’ll take the second watch. Just to be safe.”
No one objected, and after another meal of roasted hare, Zafira settled into her makeshift bed. Kifah spoke to Benyamin in low murmurs, Altair piping his opinion every so often. Like friends. They spoke to one another because they wanted to, not because they needed to.
They spoke to Zafira to ask which way to go or which path to take. She was a daama tour guide.
And she was alone, as always.
She sighed and turned to her side, looking to where the prince was keeping watch against the mottled stone. Only, he wasn’t facing the desert. He leaned against the oddly shaped thing.
Watching her.
She looked away, and it was a long time before sleep claimed her soul.
* * *
Nasir knew how she felt, when she turned to him, something bleak yawning in those scythes of blue fire. She had changed since he had first aimed an arrow at her Demenhune’s heart.
She tipped her shoulders less. Every morning since her heatstroke, she would take her cloak from her satchel and silently debate donning it. But that had ceased, too, after their … run-in at the river. It was as if she had been born to a skin she did not fit within, and only now, in the desolation of the desert, was she allowing herself to take command of it. To mold herself to it.
She stretched her long limbs and slid her gaze to him. He did not think she could rest, for night was when the demons awoke. Memories no one wanted to remember. Ghosts no one wanted to see. Nasir’s demons tended to join his slumber, too.
Good night, he wanted to whisper.
But he was the Prince of Death, Amir al-Maut, as his mother had once called him in the old tongue, and good night always felt like goodbye.
CHAPTER 56
Nasir shook the Huntress’s shoulder again. Rimaal, she slept like the dead.
If not for the rise and fall of her chest, he would have believed her dead. Just as his sleep had conjured her last night. First with her lip between his teeth. Then with her eyes glassy, red dripping from his blade.
“Yalla, yalla.” His hand trembled. A hashashin never wavered.
Her eyes flew open and locked with his, panic fleeting across her features. He shrank back from the fear in her open gaze. Fear was his constant. It was in every gaze that turned his way, so why did seeing it in one more pair of eyes make him feel as though hands were tightening around his throat?
He swallowed and her startled eyes dropped to his throat. Kharra, this woman. “You sleep like the dead.”
“You must have been hoping I was.”
No, but what a distraction to be free of. “Lower your voice,” he said, trying to ignore her sleepy rasp.
“Now’s not the time, habibi,” Altair murmured.
Indeed. They had bigger things to worry about than Altair calling him beloved.
Like the line of growling creatures surrounding them in the crumbling ruins.
“What are they?�
�� the Huntress whispered. “Wolves?” She rose, lifting her bow and nocking an arrow in one fluid movement.
Altair’s response was a low murmur. “Meet your newest adversary: the kaftar.”
They were larger than wolves. Their agile bodies were coated in sparse fur, mottled in a darker brown than their coats. Long tongues lolled out of mouths cut in perpetually wicked grins, some bearing rows of sharp teeth.
“Hyenas?” she asked. One of the seven creatures growled and yipped.
Benyamin laughed his soft laugh. “Somewhat. Though in comparison, a hyena and a kaftar are like a stream and a stormy sea.”
Another growl.
And one of the sleek storms leaped.
Powerful muscles undulated, and its depthless dark eyes flashed. Its brethren fanned out, stalking closer.
Nasir breathed down the shaft of his arrow, but before he could loosen the bowstring, a metallic arc cut through the air, catching the meager light. The moment the liquid gold touched the creature, time seemed to still.
The kaftar shifted into a man and landed on his feet.
Nasir heard the hitch in the Huntress’s breath. The hyena-turned-man shook his head like a wet dog, pinning Benyamin with glowing eyes like qahwa not steeped long. He looked like a typical Arawiyan: dark hair, dark beard, light brown skin, except for that unnatural gaze glittering with anciency.
“Alder,” the kaftar said to Benyamin in a garbled voice. Did he see Benyamin’s pointed ears through his keffiyah, or could he sniff the safi?
To his either side, the other kaftar slowly shifted into men as the remnants of Benyamin’s gold substance touched them. They were dressed in thobes, ankle-length and white, with ratty hair emerging from dark turbans. How they had attained such pristine white thobes during their shape-shift was beyond Nasir.
Benyamin tipped his head. “Kaftar.”
The kaftar bared his teeth in a smile, and Nasir thought he saw a snout and pointed teeth. Then he blinked, and the creature appeared as a man once more.
“How long since you’ve stood a man?” Benyamin asked, calm and collected, as if the kaftar were wholly human and nothing else. How long before one of you leaps and rips out someone’s throat? was what Nasir would have asked.
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